Race in Latin America

Katie investigates race and racism in Brazil and Argentina, with a focus on the African Diaspora broadly defined. She has explored this research agenda in three core arenas: the racial politics of asylum; the forms and consequences of anti-black racism; and race and the state.

The Racial Politics of Safe Haven in Brazil

In her dissertation, Katie investigates the racial configurations of refugee status determination in Brazil. While race scholars have done much work on immigration policies, they have paid less attention to asylum policy. Moreover, most research on race and immigration in Brazil has been historical. How race operates in immigration policy in contemporary Brazil remains largely unaddressed. This dissertation documents how state and nongovernmental actors mobilize and produce ethnoracial categories as they interact with asylum seekers and determine the allocation of rights, aid, and sanctions.

The Forms and Consequences of Anti-Black Racism in Brazil

In Contexts, Katie analyzed media coverage of the 2013 protests in Brazil, uncovering that violence against white women became a rallying cry for popular political action, while black mobilization was depoliticized as violent chaos and violence against blacks ignored.

Currently, she is preparing an invited chapter for a volume on the Chicago School. In it, she presents Donald Pierson’s Negroes in Brazil (1942) as a cautionary tale of how racial pre-constructed objects of inquiry can overdetermine our findings. She argues that the theoretical frameworks Pierson brought with him to the field—namely, Robert E. Park’s race relations and Gilberto Freyre’s racial democracy—blinded him from grasping conceptually the anti-blackness he documents empirically in his work.

Race and the State in Argentina

Her Master’s thesis is titled “Framing Afrodescendants in a Country ‘Donde No Hay Negros’: A Critical Analysis of the 2010 Argentine Census Survey of African Descent.” In 2010, for the first time since 1895, the Argentine census asked those living within its national territory if they were of African descent. While the inclusion of this question followed broader regional shifts to integrate questions on race and ethnicity into national censuses, this historic disjuncture is most astounding in Argentina. No country in Latin America has more successfully constructed itself as a nation donde no hay negros, where there are no blacks, than Argentina. Through a frame analysis of digital texts produced in Argentina between 2010 and 2012 regarding the new census question, this Master’s thesis uncovers how government, media and Afro organizational actors understood the meaning of Afrodescendant and the purposes of the census question. This research expands research on the African diaspora in the Americas by analyzing how racial politics of identification work in a paradigmatic nation-state of hegemonic whiteness in Latin America.